A body without labels: Anton Giulio Bragaglia and the search for the dancer-actor in Fascist Italy

This article examines the work of Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960), a theatre and film director, stage manager, militant critic, and theorist of theatre, dance, and cinema. During the 1920s, Bragaglia set out to reform the status of actor-dancers, making this interdisciplinary role central to a wider project of "theatrical theatre" and the re-theatricalization of theatre on both the stage and the written page. To pursue this project, Anton Giulio Bragaglia focused on two distinct but complementary levels, conceived and practiced as an organic whole: set design/scenography and the human body. This article focuses specifically on Bragaglia's reflections on and practices surrounding the action of the human body "in a representative situation." Bragaglia was a fervent supporter of Fascism, and I aim to demonstrate that, in the very decade in which the Fascist regime was consolidating power, he imagined a performing body that overcame the division between "theatre" and "dance." At the same time, this body he envisioned was both subjugated to and incompatible with the regime, in that it was substantially incoercible, laying outside of univocal classifications of theatre versus dance. To capture the connotations of this complex dancer-actor body, I analyze three volumes by Bragaglia, La maschera mobile (The Mobile Mask, 1926), Scultura vivente (Living Sculpture, 1928), and Jazz Band (1929), and position them in relation to their theatrical and political contexts.